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The Betrayal of Leaders: Reading the Interviews with Deleuze and Guattari!

What we hold against psychoanalysis is that it resorts to a pious conception, based on lack and castration, a sort of negative theology that involves infinite resignation. It is against this that we propose a positive conception of desire, desire that produces, not desire that is lacking in something.

– Deleuze & Guattari, Chaosophy

“Leaders betray, that’s obvious. But why do those who are led continue to listen to them,” says Felix Guattari.1

How many times I’ve asked myself that question. Too many times and the answers seem to be perplexing and mysterious. Guattari himself will answer it this way, with another question: “Wouldn’t that be the result of an unconscious complicity, of an interiorization of the repression, operating on several levels, from power to bureaucratic, from bureaucrats to militants, and from militants to the masses themselves?” (p. 70) Unconscious complicity? Willing slaves of our own thwarted desires? Unaware of…